Well, it took them long enough. Apple has finally acknowledged the existence of the MAC Defender trojan, and has offered removal instructions. The company has also promised a security update to Mac OS X that will block MAC Defender and its variants from working. All this information was published in the form of a support document on Apple's website. Update: Well, that was fast. A new variant of the trojan, called Mac Guard, has been discovered. Unlike previous variants, this one does not require users to enter their administrative password.

If I may ask, how many Macs did you have, and how many PC's overall do you manage?

Around 7,000 PCs. We had around 500 Macs.

I would add that problems with AppleCare were not the main reason we no longer have any Macs. The main reason was because Apple just wasn't very willing to work with Enterprise customers at the time (although I've heard they have gotten better about it. At that time though, they just weren't taking enterprise customers seriously). Both HP and Lenovo (our primary PC vendors) would preload our custom desktop images for us. Apple required a minimum order of 6,000 systems before they would be willing to pre-load our custom image for us.

The other issue we had with Apple is that whenever a new version of OS X came out, they would not allow us to order systems with the old version anymore. So, for example, as soon as Leopard was released, it was impossible for us to order systems with Tiger from Apple anymore. And that created major problems for us since some of our software had compatibility issues with Leopard at the time.

As you probably know, businesses are usually behind the curve when it comes to switching to new versions of software. Hell, a lot of our systems still run Windows XP Professional. Apple's unwillingness to work with our business needs is the main reason we stopped using them as a vendor.

It's a shame really, because I really do like Apple's products for the most part. They are by far the most innovative computer company in the world and doing more than any other company at taking yesterday's computer science fiction and turning it into today's reality. And they aren't afraid to take risks. Most analysts thought the iPad would flop for example, because no one would be interested in what they thought at the time was basically a "notebook computer with no keyboard".

But they really need to make some changes in how they do business. The list of changes I would like to see:

1. Fix the customer's problem, using whatever resources you have available, including Google. Stop having lawyers prevent support techs from doing their job by telling the techs they cannot confirm or deny, cannot explain how to fix, etc. Let the support techs fix the customer's problem.

2. Be more open with your business partners. As a developer, I need more information than Apple provides. It's difficult to for me to make future plans given Apple's culture of secrecy and their unwillingness to share their future plans with their business partners.

3. Be more willing to work with businesses who can't necessary instantly start using new versions of OS X as soon as they are released. Allow customers to purchase systems pre-loaded with older versions of OS X at least for awhile. At least until developers had a reasonable amount of time to fix any compatibility problems. (And again, this would be less of a problem if Apple were more open when it came to sharing information with its developer partners in advance).

If Apple would just do those three things, I would likely not have any gripes about them.

Also, the killing of the XServe without making OS X Server available to run on ESX is a pain in the arse.

Apple kind of priced themselves out of the market when it came to the XServe. They were way overpriced for what you were getting. There was also little compelling reason for businesses to use XServe / OS X Server. It can't run the (unfortunately dominant) Microsoft business applications like Exchange. Sure it can host our Java applications and such. But a Linux server can handle that job just fine for much cheaper than an XServe.

And yes, ESX was a big problem too. Apple totally missed the boat on virtualization, which really hurt them among businesses that were trying to virtualize more and reduce the number of servers they needed, reduce the cost of cooling, etc. And of course, the fact that they missed out on virtualization didn't exactly, make them popular with the "green IT" movement either.